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Archive for the ‘Realism’ Category

Why enter into the edgy territory of race and IQ discussion, asks John McWhorter, even if the most distressingly inegalitarian conclusions turn out to be true? “What, precisely, would we gain from discussing this particular issue?”

Robert Verbruggen gets to the critical response, eventually. The topic has been made inescapable because the left is ever-increasingly race-obsessed and “continue[s] to treat racial gaps as a moral emergency” based on a specific, positively egalitarian, and extremely implausible universal-anthropological theory. Challenging that is the only way to moderate the social self-flagellation. (So however uncomfortable this ‘conversation’ becomes, it isn’t going to stop.)

Competition is generally a positive thing and we are likely to have more quality and lower prices not just in the realm of physical products but in a social systems and governance. Ironically the world may end up with a genuine multicultural society instead of a monocultural leftist diktat masquerading as one. Political tensions between left and right may even decline as the points of friction are reduced. […] But not every separation necessarily ends happily. The biggest threat to a successful divorce is the need by one partner for Other People’s Money to maintain its lifestyle. There is always the possibility of domestic violence instead of new opportunities. The best guarantee of a successful transition is innovation. Entire sectors like the media, higher education and public sector unions are already facing wrenching changes, not for any defect in personnel, but because they are predicated on models whose time has passed. Possibly the most revolutionary act a person can perform at this critical moment is to create opportunities out of the ongoing disruption.

In today’s crowded societies, once again many people are feeling the drive to break away from existing cultures and establish their own institutions. Ignorant of human history, most people treat such an idea with scorn. The world of the here and now is the only real world, they say. Talk of starting a new country is “escapism.” One’s duty is to direct one’s energies toward making contemporary society a better place to live. And so on. But those who know better realize that schism is the fundamental human method for dealing with frictions within groups of people. In fact, it has been so for so long that factors predisposing people to break off from one group and start another may even have seeped into the human gene pool …

Let’s say you’ve read and loved Julian Simon, who stressed mankind’s indefatigable power of creation and innovation. I certainly have. Simon stressed that the cost of producing real resources likely would fall, thereby spreading wealth across mankind. The bad news is that probably should make you a Malthusian. …

The compact argument is brilliant, brutal, contrarian, and solidly-traditional in a way that’s not easy to over-appreciate.

Retrieved from four years ago (by XS’s favorite HBD-blogger), and still perfect in its outrageous realism:

Daniel Freedman was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. For his doctoral thesis, he did adoption studies with dogs. He had noticed that different dog breeds had different personalities, and thought it would be interesting to see if personality was inborn, or if it was somehow caused by the way in which the mother raised her puppies. Totally inborn. Little beagles were irrepressibly friendly. Shetland sheepdogs were most sensitive to a loud voice or the slightest punishment. Wire-haired terriers were so tough and aggressive that Dan had to wear gloves when playing with puppies that were only three weeks old. Basenjis were aloof and independent.

He decided to try the same thing with human infants of different breeds. Excuse me, different races. …

You’ll never guess what happens next (although, actually, the readers here are almost certain to).

The dog-breed analogy is used quite often, but probably still not enough. It’s pitched at the correct cladistic level, obviously. In addition, since ‘labrador supremacism’ sounds immediately ridiculous it should contribute to chipping a little stupidity from the race discussion.

It’s getting difficult to set any kind of limit to where this stuff could lead. Whatever counts as a ‘realistic’ socio-political forecast today, it’s been pushed out vastly further than seemed imaginable only a year ago.